Stuff for Gentoo Linux

I have been using Gentoo Linux on various machines since 2004. Apart from filing filing a few bugs I have hacked some minor things that I think could be useful. Here they are.

Perl 5.10 on Gentoo

Perl 5.10 has been in Gentoo's unstable branch for a couple of architectures for some time now, while it comes as standard with pretty much every other distribution. Upgrading is still not working flawlessly but this line from bugs.gentoo.org (with my additions for g-cpan stuff) got all the modules recompiled:

locate 5.8.8 | grep ^/usr/ | grep -v ^/usr/portage | xargs equery belongs | grep -v perl-gcpan | uniq | sed -e s/^/\=/ | xargs emerge --oneshot

Notes on Gentoo/MIPS for the Cobalt Qube 2

I bought one of those neat little boxes a while ago to serve as a router, proxy, media server etc. that doesn't consume as much energy as your regular Intel box, looks good, and is generally geeky :) Of course it's going to run Gentoo! It's not quite finished yet but here are some notes on stuff I found noteworthy during the installation already.

• The Gentoo Handbook is a little unclear about what exactly happens when you netboot the Qube with one of the provided images: even though it sounds like the Handbook assumed everyone had the enhanced Cobalt loader “CoLo” installed already, it is in fact the first “kernel” image the firmware loads. This is the smaller file the vmlinux.gz link in /nfsroot points to. CoLo gives you a boot menu and allows to load the actual kernel image with the initramfs. Some problems that might turn up during this process, i.e. that turned up here:
  • Be quick to select the NFS option on the LCD. After about five seconds without a key pressed, CoLo will try and start booting the system from HD.
  • Make sure that not only are the files in your /nfsroot world-readable but also the directory itself! Otherwise you'll get an “authenticated mount request” message in the syslog but CoLo will not work anyway.
  • In my case, CoLo refused to boot, complaining about a missing variable (meaning an unset option in the dhcpd config). On the terminal you should have attached to the serial port by now you can force it by specifying the parameters for server, directory and image explicitly:

    nfs 192.168.0.10 /nfsroot kernel.gz

    in my case. This got me to the point where ash starts.
• The date command in busybox is weird. Even if you think you know it, RTFM.
• The partitioning and formatting parts held no surprises for me. The stage tarball location from the handbook is both outdated (in that the link doesn't work) and apparently wrong though, You can find stage tarballs in another distfiles directory but they seem to be for big endian MIPSes only. I got mine from redhatter who also provides the boot images, and they work fine.
• Before chrooting, you're supposed to bind-mount /dev into the chroot environment, but the command fails with an “invalid argument” error at mount -o bind /dev /mnt/gentoo/dev. Never mind, the essential device nodes are included in the the stage tarball and will let you finish the installation just fine. And by the way, just start the portage tarball unpacking in the background and edit your make.conf while it's running. You can also set your profile already—you'll notice it has moved a little since the Installation Handbook was edited, mine is at /usr/portage/profiles/default-linux/mips/2007.0/cobalt/o32/nptl/.
• You can use make cobalt_defconfig to generate a halfway usable kernel configuration, but you'll probably want to tweak it. For example, “Support for hot-pluggable devices” is required for udev, and even though udev is not really required for a server I find it pretty convenient, so I had to turn this on. On top of that, I enabled ext3fs support (very important), ACLs, the NFS server and NLS with a default of utf8.

sarad

I wrote an init script and corresponding config file [SIG] for the SARA daemon that serves the BNC. Also see the security patch for this daemon that fixes critical buffer overflows!

HSC

HSC comes with an ebuild file for portage. The latest version [SIG] has been simplified a bit and unlike the last one distributed with the 1.0 sources uses the recommended shell functions for configuration and compilation.

Die Office-Bibliothek unter Gentoo

This section is probably of no interest to users who don't speak German as it deals with German-language dictionary software.

Ah, Closed-Source-Software – da kann man endlos Spaß damit haben. Die Office-Bibliothek ist so ein Programm. Wer Nachschlagewerke von Duden oder Brockhaus benutzen will, kommt nicht darum herum. Man kann schon dankbar sein, dass die Nulpen von Joanneum Research (den eigentlich an dieser Stelle fälligen rassistischen Kommentar zu dot-at verkneife ich mir mal) wenn schon keine vernünftige Suchfunktion so doch wenigstens eine Linux-Version (eine Linux-für-x86-Version, um genau zu sein) hinbekommen haben. Schön wäre es jetzt noch gewesen, wenn man die auch unter Gentoo/x86 einfach installieren könnte, was man aber nicht kann. D.h. installieren schon, nur läuft das Machwerk dann nicht. Mal abgesehen davon, dass die .tar.gz-Variante vergisst, diverse Fonts nach /opt/officebib/ zu installieren und stattdessen das komplette data-Verzeichnis world-writable macht¹.

$ officebib
xset:  bad font path element (#76), possible causes are:
Directory does not exist or has wrong permissions
Directory missing fonts.dir
Incorrect font server address or syntax
/opt/officebib/officebib.bin: /opt/officebib/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_3.3'
not found (required by /usr/lib/gcc/i686-pc-linux-gnu/3.4.6/libstdc++.so.6)
xset:  warning, no entries deleted from font path.

Wieso bringt das Ding eigentlich seine eigene libgcc mit? Um Inkompatibilitäten mit den installierten zu vermeiden? Hier ist sie offensichtlich Ursache derselben: sie ist schlicht überflüssig. Nach dem löschen von /opt/officebib/libgcc_s.so.1 läuft das Programm so gut wie es eben läuft.

Diese Methode funktioniert mit Version 4.0, Build 180105 der Office-Bibliothek und gcc 3.4, ältere Versionen habe ich nicht getestet. Interessanterweise scheint die mit Version 3.0 Rev. 1 mitgelieferte libgcc zu funktionieren, dies ist aber nur ein eher zufälliges Ergebnis vom Rechner eines Kollegen, das ich zu faul war, mir näher anzuschauen.

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Last change: 14-May-2010, 11:22